MavenToolchains

A Toolchain is a preconfigured object that Maven plugins can use for tool configuration retrieval (location and other information).

The toolchains-plugin can read available toolchains on the user's computer
and match them against the toolchain requirements of the project (as configured in pom.xml):
if match is found, the toolchain instance is made available to other Maven plugins.

With jdk toolchain, for example, instead of being stuck with the JDK used to run Maven, all plugins can use
the same other JDK instance without hardcoding absolute paths into the pom.xml
and without configuring every plugin that require path to JDK tools.